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In Infinite Temporal Series expatriate Australian Prue
Lang immerses the audience in an infinitely intriguing experience.
It is deliberately intimate, with the tiny audience situated in
close proximity to the dancers in a series of rooms, each with a
bench along one wall. Each room has a frame in the back wall,
allowing the audience to see through to the next, or look back
towards the first. Audience members are encouraged to move from one
room to the next, though it can be equally satisfying to remain in
one place throughout the 35-minute presentation.

At first, it feels like one of those lessons in the art of
perspective, with the performers diminishing in size, becoming more
remote the further they are distanced from the viewer. A dancer
stands motionless in each room. All begin slowly and simultaneously
with a slow twist, drawing a languorous hand up the front of the
body to reach upwards, then stepping out into a sweeping spiral.
One is caught between watching the close-up detail of the proximal
dancer, or enjoying the synergy of the ensemble.

The dancers maintain a distanced focus, but we can see the
tremble of muscles, the flicker of eyelashes, and hear the harsh
breathing as they are pulled or projected violently by some
apparently external force. Over this, one dancer addresses his
audience in a gentle treatise on being and not being. The words
appear to have no direct relationship to the action, but somehow
influence our thinking.

Gradually the dancers introduce different movements so that we
see contrasts in energy or direction from a single dancer, set
against the synchronicity of the group. The intricacy increases,
but we have been led into it slowly, learning to enjoy the
multiplicity of choices. The serendipitous intrusions of audience
members as they move from one room to another, taking up positions
to look forward or backwards, add to the tantalising complexity.
Faces turned backwards to see through to the front room become
framed like portraits. We see our neighbours in a new light -
unwittingly becoming performers in a completely unthreatening
way.

This is a profoundly satisfying work, carefully polished - not
to be missed.